Harry Booker:HARRY BOOKER, who has died aged 92, was an accountant in Trinity College Dublin, an official with the Irish Rugby Football Union, a governor of the High School, Dublin, for over 50 years and a tireless community worker.
A man of infectious enthusiasm, energy and organisational ability, he kept going at a pace for almost all of his 92 years that would have floored a man a third his age. As his son, Harold, told his funeral this week (quoting Claude Pepper, the liberal US politician), Booker believed life was like riding a bicycle – “you won’t fall off unless you stop peddling”.
It was a maxim by which he lived, touching the lives of many others in diverse walks of life, as evidenced by the fact that his funeral was packed, mourners overflowing from St Patrick’s Church of Ireland church in Greystones, Co Wicklow, filling the adjoining parish hall and spilling into the church grounds.
William George Harold Booker, known to all as Harry, was born in 1919, the first child of George and Anne Booker of Rathmines, Dublin. He was joined by a sister, Joan, and the family moved eventually to Mount Merrion.
After Belgrave kindergarten school and the High School (then located at No 40 Harcourt Street, Dublin), Booker became company secretary at Thomas Heiton, the coal merchants and builders providers. Later, and for most of his career, he was an accountant at Trinity College.
The college conferred on him an honorary MA. On taking early retirement, he began working for the IRFU with the union’s then secretary, the late Bob Fitzgerald, with whom he was great friends.
Booker’s love of rugby was long-standing. After secondary school, he played outhalf for the Wanderers club, for both the 1st XV and the 2nd XV, which he also captained. He was president of the club in the 1987-88 season. After his playing career ended, he became a referee with the Association of Referees, Leinster Branch IRFU, of which he was president in its 50th year for the 1973-74 season.
Before joining the union after Trinity, he was honorary baggage master, first for the Leinster rugby team and then also for the national team. Long before the present era of slick professionalism, Booker organised logistics, gear and everything the players and committee required with a skill and dedication that money could not buy.
He was also involved in arranging the first Irish schoolboys rugby tour to Australia and he was instrumental in bringing the first American football team to Lansdowne Road, when two college teams played the Emerald Isle Classic before a crowd of some 45,000. He was heavily involved in bringing the Football Association of Ireland back to Lansdowne Road (now the Aviva Stadium) after an absence of 45 years.
Booker’s sports interests knew few bounds. He ran with the Dublin University Harriers and was club president for two seasons in 1965-66 and 1966-67; he played cricket for the High School Old Boys, the Trinity staff team and the St James’s Gate (Guinness) team.
At the High School, he organised the former pupils’ annual dinner for 45 years (and every other year organised a separate London dinner to coincide with the Ireland-England rugby international at Twickenham). He was president of the Old Boys Union in 1967-68 and a patron until his death.
In 1951, he married Rhona (née Nichols). They were inseparable for 60 happy years and had four children – Jennifer, Melanie, Harold and David.
Booker was a regular church-goer and served on the select vestries of St Thomas’s in Mount Merrion, later in Greystones, after moving there in 1990. In both churches, he was instrumental in initiating ecumenical balls, where worshippers from across the community came together to socialise.
Harry Booker was a visible presence in the community. He was the sort of person on whom communities depend and without whose tireless efforts a myriad of local organisations simply do not thrive.
He was active – “directing operations” he liked to term it – in his local tidy towns committee, helping Greystones Dart station win a national tidy towns award in 2007; he helped create a millennium walk along the seafront, was a driving force in the local chamber of commerce and was president of his local Probus, a group for retired gentlemen.
One of his more unusual claims to fame was that he was the only known male member of his local Women’s League of Health, of which Rhona was a member and fitness teacher, recruiting him for his organisational skills for its 75th anniversary celebrations.
His wife, Rhona, survives him, as do his children and sister Joan, his grandchildren Robin, Nikki, Kerrie, Robert, Debbie and Jill, and step-grandchildren Sarah, Mark, Jamie, Nicholas and Aron – to whom he gave grandfatherly advice: “Keep your chin over the plate, your eye on the ball and shut the door behind you.”
William George (Harry) Booker: born January 18th, 1919; died July 21st, 2011.